30 August 2012

V I Lenin wrote constantly. Writing, and publishing his
writing in newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and books was Lenin’s main means of
communication with the enormous movement that he led. Lenin was a very good and
skilled writer, was the leading theoretician of his time, and was critically
involved in world-shaping events. Marxists Internet Archive (MIA) contains 4170
“of a potential 4500” Lenin-authored documents, listed by date, and alphabetically by title.
MIA also has the Progress Publishers, Moscow 1963-64 “Lenin Selected Works” selection. Which of Lenin’s works should be included
among our choice of classics? We have taken a view, and have included a number
of them. Feedback is welcome, if you agree, or if you disagree.

Today we choose the crucial document that launched National Democratic Revolution (NDR) as
the defining strategy and tactics of the struggle against Imperialism. Lenin
gave the report-back of the Commission on the National and Colonial Question to
the Second Congress of the Communist International (often abbreviated as
“2CCI”) on 26 July, 1920. This is the document that is downloadable via the
first link below.

Origin of South
Africa’s National Democratic Revolution

The following year, at the third Comintern Congress
(“3CCI”), the Communist Party of South Africa was admitted and thereby
originally constituted, not on its own terms but on the Comintern’s terms,
which since the previous year had included the NDR policy. This is the true
origin of South Africa’s National Democratic Revolution of today.

Practical politics is always a matter of alliance, and in
different circumstances, different alliances are called for. Communists
commonly regard an alliance between workers and peasants as normal (hence the
hammer-and-sickle logo, which was adopted as “official” by the communists in
the same period). Proletarian parties have also, in the past, attempted class
alliances with the bourgeoisie against feudalism, or against colonialism.

Tactical alliances - unity-in-action - are normal and
necessary, in order to isolate and thereby to defeat an adversary, and equally
to avoid being isolated and defeated by the adversary. Therefore the question
of the appropriate alliances in the anti-colonial and anti-Imperialist struggle
was bound to arise.

In his report to the 2CCI on the National & Colonial
Question, Lenin says: “We have discussed whether it would be right or
wrong, in principle and in theory, to state that the Communist International
and the Communist parties must support the bourgeois-democratic movement in
backward countries. As a result of our discussion, we have arrived at the
unanimous decision to speak of the national-revolutionary
movement rather than of the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ movement. It is beyond doubt that any national
movement can only be a bourgeois-democratic movement, since the
overwhelming mass of the population in the backward countries consist of peasants who represent bourgeois-capitalist
relationships… However, the objections have been raised that, if we speak
of the bourgeois-democratic movement, we shall be obliterating all distinctions
between the reformist and the revolutionary movements. Yet that distinction has
been very clearly revealed of late in the backward and colonial countries…”

Here are all the makings of the NDR, including the name, even
if the words are not quite in their present-day order. Lenin calls it
“national-revolutionary”, but he makes it absolutely clear that he is talking
of a democratic class alliance with anti-colonial, anti-Imperialist elements of
the national bourgeoisie in colonial countries.

The 2CCI was followed within two months by the famous
“Congress of the Peoples of the East”, in Baku, in the southern part of
what was soon to become the Soviet Union. This was the first international
anti-colonial conference, and what followed it during the remainder of the 20th
Century was the defeat of direct colonial rule throughout the entire globe,
based on the tactics laid down in Lenin’s report.

Therefore Lenin’s report on the National and Colonial
Question is treated here as an undoubted classic.